Power System Operators must avail and supply the electrical power grid with sufficient electrical energy to meet energy consumer demand, subject to the electrical network constraints, supply resource constraints, and constraints required by various governmental or quasi-governmental regulations. Typically available power resources, such as but not necessarily limited to, electric power generation plants, demand response, storage resources, energy made available through bilateral contracts and market-based trade opportunities (hereinafter generally and collectively referred to as “Power Resources”) are scheduled to supply such service on the power grid as they are predicted or made available. Such Power Resources can be scheduled ahead of time and then adjusted to near real time to meet fluctuating, but typically predicable, user energy demand.
While economic dispatch applications have been in use in the energy industry for many years, such systems typically consider only conventional power resources, ignoring Demand Response (DR) and Distributed Energy Resources (DER) and storage resources. Incorporation of dispatchable DR/DER assets and storage resources into economic dispatch applications has yet to be successfully developed. The systems and methods described herein, however, fill this gap. The field commands to incorporate the results of economic dispatch have thus far been attempted only for conventional generating resources (through Automatic Generation Control known as AGC). A similar process to convey economic dispatch results to DR/DER field devices has been missing. This invention fills these gaps as well.
The current disclosure relates, in at least one embodiment, to the computation of the day ahead, day-of, and real-time schedules for Power Resources all while taking into account bilateral contracts and market-based trade opportunities.